So in 1990,
The teacher Sharon Salzberg was at a small conference in India where a group of teachers and psychologists had an opportunity to meet with His Holiness,
The Dalai Lama.
And Sharon asked the question to the Dalai Lama,
What do you think about self-hatred?
And he was very confused by this.
And he first asked his translator to explain this to him.
And then he asked Sharon,
What is that?
And so she tried to explain that it's self-judgment,
Feelings of inadequacy,
Negative thought patterns.
And his response to that was,
How could you think of yourself in that way?
And then he went on to explain that we all have Buddha nature.
So isn't that interesting that the Dalai Lama was so surprised about this negative way of relating to ourselves,
An attitude that is really,
Really common to most of us in the United States?
I mean,
There are problems in every society and every philosophical school.
But I think it's pretty powerful to reflect on what the Dalai Lama was pointing to.
You know,
When we look underneath our habits and our desires and our fears,
What is there is Buddha nature,
The capacity for love and awareness.
The capacity for love and awareness.
And there is a cultural perception in our culture in a way that if you look,
What you find actually is nothing good,
Is worthlessness.
And what the Dalai Lama is pointing to is that no,
It's only good.
How could you think of yourself in that way?
But we do,
Don't we?
To varying degrees.
I found that many people who I've spoken to in this practice space feel the greatest sense of struggle around the question of cultivating genuine love for oneself.
You know,
We're conditioned to associate self-love with kind of selfishness,
A sort of narcissism.
And self-deprecation is actually kind of a virtuous way of being.
As I was thinking about this,
About topics really that I wanted to explore with you all,
The first was really around perception,
How we perceive ourselves and others.
But last week I felt really moved by the group to explore self-love.
So over these next few days,
We'll look at these two topics,
Perception and the relationship to self-love,
Because there is a relationship.
Our perception has a great deal to do with our ability to love ourselves without condition.
They're actually not that separate.
So by way of understanding self-perception,
I want to look at it from a psychological standpoint as well as the Buddhist understanding.
And in psychology,
Self-perception is defined as the process of observing and interpreting our own behaviors,
Thoughts,
And feelings,
And then using those observations and interpretations to define ourselves.
For example,
Who were you in middle school?
Maybe some of you don't remember,
And maybe you don't want to remember who you were in middle school.
But I think this is actually a really good jumping off point,
Because so much of our selfing started back then.
And by selfing,
I mean we're acting from this early process of self-perception.
We began actively creating a self.
We're making up our self.
And in middle school,
That's when I first personally became aware of who I was,
The selfing,
And how other people saw me.
And it may be later for you.
It may be quite earlier.
But when you really first touched into this self-perception,
This is who I am.
I'm shy.
I'm quiet.
I'm friendly.
I'm helpful.
And it's more than like I like riding horses,
So therefore I'm a horseback rider.
It's more than that.
We told ourselves something based on our thoughts,
On our feelings,
On our behaviors.
We told ourselves something about ourselves.
For me,
It was I'm alone,
And I don't fit in.
So that's deeper,
Right?
That's deeper than I like riding horses.
That self-perception wasn't on the surface.
It's not an identity.
And I'm alone,
And I don't fit in.
And man,
That self-conception has been following me around for a long time.
So what's yours?
What's yours?
This is what I'd like to get to with you.
Because if we can get to the early,
Maybe even multi-generational self-perception,
Then we can meet those barriers to love,
To self-love.
It was Rumi who said,
Your task is not to seek for love,
But merely to find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
So that's what I'd like to do with you,
Finding the barriers.
And the barriers are a lot of them are around this self-perception,
This self-concept.
So this idea of selfing,
We have these ideas and concepts and attachments to this is me,
Myself,
And mine.
And in the teachings of the Buddha,
The idea of self,
Any kind of idea of self is seen as a concept.
And the word in the Pali language,
The original language of the Buddha,
Is sanya.
And it usually translates into English as perception.
But the word sanya implies not only the sensory perception,
There are also labels and ideas and concepts of what that is.
And sometimes these labels and concepts are accurate,
And sometimes they're not.
So as we explore self-perception,
I think it's important to remember that the spirit of these teachings are not so much to discover who we are,
We're looking,
But we want to discover what we're doing in the world.
What are the activities of the mind?
What are the projections of the mind that we're involved in and acting from?
And this is where meditation becomes really important.
Because as we meditate,
We're getting a sense of stability and calm,
We get quieter.
And as we quiet down,
We start to see the activities of selfing.
More and more we see these thoughts and ideas,
Some of them are really old.
We see the judgments,
We see how our thoughts come up,
And how we latch onto and hold on to and get pushed around by these ideas of who I am.
We get troubled,
Like there's,
It's troubling how we get pulled around by our idea of self.
So what we're working with a lot is an activity of the mind that kind of just projects and creates ideas and concepts around these things that we identify as us,
As ourself.
And our ability to care about this is to have some love and care for this construction.
We have to see the construction.
It's an important part of our practice,
Because the integration of the construction,
The seeing of it is really the doorway to our freedom from it.
So I'll stop here today and take any questions you may have.
And thank you for considering this topic of perception of self and how it relates to loving ourselves.
